Heartland-The Second Book of the Codex of Souls (15 page)

Switching off the engine, she leaned toward me as she opened her door. Her eyes were dark pools, and the Chorus pulsated in time with her heartbeat. "It wasn't that long ago," she said quietly.

She led me up a flight of stairs to a tiny second-floor apartment. The living room looked out over the courtyard, and judging by the lack of a television and how empty the pair of bookcases were, as well as the position of the only comfortable chair in the room, watching the neighbors was the primary source of entertainment. A stub of a hallway led to a bathroom and a single bedroom. Around the corner from the door was a tiny nook and kitchen.

Marielle filled a teapot from the tap and put it on the stove. "There should be fresh clothes in the wardrobe," she said. "You can take a shower too, if you'd like."

I nodded. "Where are we?"

"Somewhere safe. A friend's." She nodded toward the picture window. "The others are across the courtyard. We'll join them when you're ready."

"The others?"

"Loyalists. People who we can trust."

I wandered over to the window and lifted the edge of the curtain. The window of the second-floor apartment across the way was lit, though the curtains were drawn. "How many?" I asked.

"Eight."

"That's all?"

"Here, yes. Things have gotten bad, and we don't know who we can trust. We can't afford to meet openly." She opened the cupboard and took down two plastic mugs with lids.

"How bad?" I asked.

"We're not sure. It has been difficult to get accurate information. Some of the rank have just gone into hiding—we hope—and they're waiting out this whole affair. The rest—" She didn't finish, and she didn't need to. The rest were ending up like Father Cristobel.

"What are they doing?" I nodded toward the other apartment

Marielle snorted. "Talking, mostly."

I let the curtain drop. "I guess I'll go get cleaned up."

She nodded distractedly, busy spooning loose tea into each of the two mugs.

I didn't think much about the war council going on in the other apartment while I showered. Instead, my mind kept wandering back to what she had said just before getting out of the car.

It hadn't been that long, nor had there been any sort of serious relationship in between. Granted, what Marielle and I had shared during my time in Paris couldn't be considered serious, as the specter of whether or not she was still dating Antoine hovered over us. She had said it was over, but I had always suspected she had neglected to tell Antoine that fact. Or, if she had, neither of them had really believed their separation was permanent. I wasn't Rebound Guy, more the Transient Mysterious Stranger. Not the healthiest of relationships, but compared to the others I'd had, it was pretty cut-and-dried. We liked each other—a lot—and knowing that circumstances were going to doom us at some point, we simply lived in the moment. The arrangement worked until the duel on New Year's Day.

The Chorus had been obsessed with Katarina, and so I had never been fully able to commit my heart to Marielle, and she had a connection to Antoine that remained steadfast throughout our relationship. We were both bound to others, but that hadn't diminished the intensity of our attraction to each other. You can love more than one person—the human heart has such capacity—but you will never be completely resolute in your attention. There will always be the distraction of that other person in your mind.

Even with Reija—and Rose, too—there had been the ghost of Katarina. But now that the
Qliphotic
shadow was gone, I was no longer as divided as I had been. I could give my full attention to Marielle.

There was only one annoying detail: the spirit of her father floating in my head. Kind of a mood killer. Unless I could figure a way to lock him out.

I gave that some thought while I stood in the shower. It kept me from thinking of other things. Like the slope of her neck, and the way a pearl kept nestling in the hollow of her throat. Like a soap bubble, a tiny moment of time caught in a sphere of magick.

On the morning of the new year, the city slept, exhausted from the midnight revelry of the new aeon. We had survived the millennial change, regardless of how you counted the first year of the next century, and the parties had been flush with the release of all the pent-up panic and apprehension that had unconsciously filled our hearts during the last years of the old world. It was a new world—this shiny twenty-first century, this third millennium—and while everyone slept off the hangover of the old, the new was still too young to be fully aware. We were outside of time for a few hours, between midnight and daybreak, where nothing mattered. Where nothing was true but the breathless promises exchanged during the ebb and flow of our rhythm. For a few hours, wrapped in the midnight cloak of cosmological renewal, we could pretend the past and the future weren't connected. We could close our eyes and forget our fears, thinking such elective blindness did, indeed, wash away the stains of our history. We could forget our petty jealousies and febrile paranoia. For a few hours.

Paris slept, wrapped in heavy blankets against the winter chill, and no one saw the sun's light splash across the white walls of Sacré-Cœur but Marielle and I.

She leaned against the railing of the apartment balcony. Her dark hair was a tangled mass of curls, and she wore an old anorak, threadbare at the left elbow and unraveling along the top of the right shoulder in a way that made it slip down on her arm, revealing the base of her neck. It was too long, coming down to mid-thigh, and her bare legs and feet seemed unaware of the chill air. She held a bottle of soapy water in her left hand and, plastic wand held close to her lips with her right, she blew a stream of bubbles out across the rooftops of the sleeping city.

The clothes weren't hers, nor was the apartment. A friend of Marielle's—a flash of blonde hair in the lights of the club and a husky voice in my ear—had pressed herself up against me shortly after midnight. "She has the key," the friend had said. "Take her away from here." She gave me the passcode to the security system, and thus armed—key and code—we had vanished from the world. Anonymous and lost to everyone but each other. Suspended between midnight and dawn, between the last and the next, we could come together one final time.

I sat on the edge of the bed and watched Marielle blow soap bubbles, my left hand covering the ugly scabs on my right knuckles. There was no disguising the black stain of the bruise forming under my left eye, yet she hadn't said anything about it other than to brush the tender skin once with her lips during our out-of-time excursion.

She dipped the wand into the bottle and glanced back into the shadows of the apartment, her hair falling across her face. "Come outside," she said. "Watch the dawn with me."

Pont Alexandre. At daybreak.

I was already late.

I shook my head. "I have to go," I said.

She looked across the rooftops and lifted the wand to her lips. A mist of soap bubbles streamed away into the world. "What would you do for love?" she asked. "Anything?" The tiny bubbles—slippery with gold and green light—spun and turned, caught in the eddies of air rising from the street.

" 'Anything' is a dangerous word," I said, recalling the taste of her finger in my mouth, of the bone beneath the skin; her pinkie digging into my cheek as I bit her ring finger.
Mark me as yours, wolf, so that we never forget. Let us choose this.

She walked to the balcony door, framed by the white light reflecting off Sacré-Cœur. "So is 'love.' " She blew a large bubble, a swirling globe of iridescence, and with a tiny flick of her wrist, she set it free.

It floated toward me, a sphere of rainbow light. I was afraid to catch it, as if there might be too much electrical tension in my skin. As long as it didn't break, I didn't have to answer her question. I didn't have to look past her and recognize the dawn.

"What are you afraid of, my wolf?"

"I don't want to break it."

It wasn't tomorrow. Not yet. Like this bubble, we were still caught outside of time.

"I can blow another one." She dipped the wand in the bottle slowly, her pinkie finger delicately raised from the end of the wand as if she were using a silver spoon to stir tea. She watched me, her eyes in shadow, the light making a halo in her hair. "But it won't be the same."

The bubble landed on my naked thigh, and for a second, it hung there, quivering and swirling like a gaseous world, then it popped with a tiny noise like the death of a star. Perhaps the noise came from me. The memory was filled with the striated noise of the Chorus.

"You can't save them," she said gently. "They will all fall, and they will all vanish. Just like every minute of our lives. What is done is done, and what is gone is gone."

"I know." I touched the damp spot on my leg. "It's just—I wish . . . "

She came into the room, and straddled me, her naked body pressing against my groin. The fabric of the anorak tickled my chest and arms. Looking down, she dipped the wand into the bottle and blew a stream of bubbles into my face. "I'm sorry," she said. "I never thought it would come to this. I thought you two would be stronger, but you are too polarized. Antoine is your opposite, I see that now; he is like you and yet so different. He knows his heart intimately; he takes it out and scrutinizes it every day, trying to understand what makes it work. Yet, he will never understand the passion that pumps through it."

My face was wet with exploded soap bubbles, and she lowered her head to kiss me. Her lips brushed and caressed each damp splash of soap. "And you, my wolf, refuse to look at your heart for fear of being overwhelmed by the passion therein."

We are all bound to something, be it darkness or light; sometimes we choose which, and sometimes it is chosen for us.

A bubble caught in my throat, one of my own creation, and I couldn't get it out. I couldn't find the breath or the energy to make it rise. My heart, cold and frozen, was a stone in my chest. The Chorus lay about it, a writhing mass of black serpents.

Let us choose this.

"He will kill you," she whispered, "because that is the only way he understands how to ease the pain in his heart. If he does, he will lose me, and he knows this, but he doesn't know any other way." Her lips moved to mine and lingered there. My hands held her waist, and she leaned against me, the bottle of soap bubbles crushed between us.

"If you kill him," she whispered, her voice all but lost in the noise of my pulse, "do it because your heart wants such an end, and not because you think I do. And, if you do, you, too, will break my heart."

She plucked my left hand from her hip and slipped it under the anorak, up between her breasts so I could feel the heat of her skin, so I could feel the pulse of her heart. One last time.

"The old world is gone," she said with a sad smile. "The new one begins today, when my heart stops."

What is done is done, what is gone is gone.

A barrel-chested man with a bushy beard answered the door of the apartment on the other side of the courtyard. His face lit up as he saw Marielle, but when he glanced at our hands and realized they were empty, the light faded. "I thought you were getting food."

"No," Marielle said. "I went to pick up my friend."

The bearded man examined me, and the Chorus held still, letting his magick wash over me. "Do I know you?" He moved behind the door, closing it slightly. Behind him, I could hear strident voices.

Hubert Lafoutain,
the Chorus reminded me, tagging old memories with new details.
Protector of the Archives. He Witnessed your trial
.

I put out my hand. "M. Lafoutain," I said. "It has been some time. I never properly thanked you for putting your name on the Record on my behalf. My initiation to the rank."

The Bear, we called him. Gregarious, slow to anger, easily distracted when food was involved. An old friend of the family, Lafoutain had studied with Marielle's father. He had been an adjunct professor at the University of Paris in the late part of the twentieth century, before retiring to devote his attention to the Archives, though I wondered if he still taught a class here and there. Once a teacher, always a teacher.

"Ah, yes," Lafoutain said after a moment of searching his own memory. "I do recall an earnest student who didn't have the common sense God gave goats. The straddler. Caught between two worlds. What was it? 'Markham.' That's right. Landis Markham, yes?"

"That would be me, sir," I admitted. "Call me Michael." I hadn't been the most adept of adepts; my pre-Watcher education was full of holes. A flush crawled up into my hair, and I resisted the temptation to check the expression on Marielle's face.

"Michael it is." Lafoutain looked past us, his magick fading into the ambient etheric vibrations surrounding the doorway. "No one else with you?"

The courtyard was empty and quiet; there were no souls for the Chorus to mark.

"Damn their eyes," Lafoutain sighed as he stepped back from the door, opening it further. "I told them to just go down to the corner." He shut the door after we entered the apartment, and traced a finger between two lumps of silver stuck to the back of the door. Activation nodes for a magick circle, his touch completed the circuit again and the magick engaged. My ears popped with the sudden change in air pressure. "There's no food left," he explained. "There wasn't much to begin with, and they've had nothing to do but bitch and eat."

"No news, then?" Marielle asked, the tone of her voice suggesting she already knew the answer.

Lafoutain squeezed past me, shaking his head. "Nothing good."

This apartment was much bigger than the one across the courtyard. A central hall ran from the front door back to the long rectangular space of the kitchen. A large living room opened to our right, off the main hall, and from there another hallway led back to bedrooms. On our left was a narrow sitting room, filled with bookcases, and beyond that was a large dining room that had been turned into the war council chamber. The lights were bright in there, and men clustered around the central table, arguing.